Sixties
Citypresents
a wide-ranging series of
articles on all aspects of the Sixties, penned by the creator of the iconic
60s music paper Mersey
Beat

Parlophone
R5570, Produced by George Martin, features the song penned by Paul
in the autumn of 1966 when The Beatles had decided to make a concept album
inspired by their childhood in Liverpool. Digging into their memories,
Paul produced ‘Penny Lane’ and John composed ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
When the time came for the song to be recorded, Paul had the number completely
finished and had drafted out a rough arrangement for the brass section.
Paul commented: “Penny Lane is a bus roundabout in Liverpool, and there
is a barber’s shop showing photographs of every head he’s had the pleasure
to know – no, that’s not true, they’re just photos of hairstyles, but
all the people who come and go stop and say hello.
There’s a bank on the corner, so we made up the bit about the banker in
his motor car. It’s part fact, part nostalgia for a place, which is a
great place, blue suburban skies as we remember it, and it’s still there.
And we put in a joke or two: ‘Four of fish and finger pie.’ The women
would never dare say that, except to themselves. Most people wouldn’t
hear it, but ‘finger pie’ is just a nice little joke about the Liverpool
lads who like a bit of smut.”

Incidentally, the barber’s shop was called Bioletti’s. In his biography,
‘Many Years From Now', Paul recalled,
“It was all based on real things; there was a bank on the corner so I
imagined the banker, it was not a real person, and his slightly dubious
habits and the little children laughing at him, and the pouring rain.
The fire station was a bit of poetic licence; there’s a fire station about
half a mile down the road, not actually in Penny Lane, but we needed a
third verse so we took that and I was very pleased with the line ‘It’s
a clean machine".

The track was recorded in January 1967 and among the musicians who were to perform
on overdubs were flautists Ray Swinfield, P.Goody, Manny Winters and Dennis
Walton; trumpeters Leon Calvert, Freddy Clayton, Bert Courtley and Duncan Campbell;
oboists Dick Morgan and Mike Winfield – and bassist Frank Clarke. Clarke was
later to say, “I’ve spent a lifetime playing with top orchestras, yet I’m most
famous for playing on 'Penny Lane”.

Paul was still not satisfied with the track and he was sitting at home watching
the BBC2 TV show ‘Masterworks’ with David Mason performing Bach’s Brandenberg
Concerto No.2 in F Major. He arranged for Mason to be hired to play trumpet
on the ‘Penny Lane’ track and was satisfied with the finished result. Recording
manager George Martin commented, “We had no music prepared. We just knew
that we wanted little piping interjections. As we came to each little section
where we wanted the sound, Paul would think up the notes he wanted and I
would write them down for David. The result was unique, something that had
never been done in rock music before, and it gave ‘Penny Lane’ a very distinct
character”.

The number is one of the most uplifting and cheery of the Beatles' songs
and caused problems in Liverpool with fans stealing the actual Penny Lane
street signs. It was an act later to be repeated at Abbey Road and resulted
in Liverpool Corporation ceasing to make street signs for Penny Lane, settling
for painting the street name on buildings instead. It was suggested that
Paul might have been inspired by Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘Fern Hill’, a nostalgic
look at childhood, which Paul had been reading at the time. He composed
the number on his piano at his Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood house.The piano had a psychedelic
rainbow painted on it by David Vaughan of BEV.
John Lennon helped him on the third verse.

‘Penny Lane’ was issued as a double ‘A’ side with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’
on Parlophone R5570 on Friday 17th February 1967 when it became the first Beatles
single since ‘Love Me Do’ not to hit the No.1 spot, being held at No.2 by the
Engelbert Humperdinck hit ‘Release Me’. The British release received its world
premier broadcast via the pirate radio station Radio London and Parlophone issued
the first 250,000 in special bags with a full colour sleeve. It was released in
America on Capitol 5810 on Monday 13th February 1967 with advance orders of over
a million copies.This
was a record in itself for Capitol, with the highest quantity of a single ever
pressed and shipped out in a three-day period. The number topped the charts in
the U.S. A different version of the number was included on the ‘Anthology 2’ CD.

Sixties
City note:
Stan Williams, a former schoolfriend of John Lennon, identifies the nurse as Beth
Davidson in a book about growing up in Liverpool. Williams said Lennon would have
known Davidson from his childhood. The lyrics to the song are: "Behind the shelter
in the middle of the roundabout, the pretty nurse is selling poppies from the
tray, and though she feels she's in a play, she is anyway."
According to Williams, a group of boys, including Lennon, saw Davidson selling
poppies on the street dressed in a cadet nurse's uniform. "In my mind's eye, I
still like to visit that special October day in 1954 when Beth had her image trapped
within the lens of Lennon's creative imagination," Williams told the Daily Telegraph.
Davidson died of cancer in the 1970s.

Bill
Harryattended
the Liverpool College of Art with Stuart Sutcliffe and John Lennon and made
the arrangements for Brian Epstein to visit The Cavern, where he saw The
Beatles for the first time. Bill was a member of 'The Dissenters' and the
founder and editor of 'Mersey Beat', the iconic weekly music newspaper
that documented the early Sixties music scene in the Liverpool area and
is possibly best known for being the first periodical to feature a local
band called 'The Beatles'. He has worked as a high powered publicist, doing
PR for acts such as Suzi Quatro, Free, The Arrows and Hot Chocolate and
has managed press campaigns for record labels such as CBS, EMI, Polydor.
Bill is the critically acclaimed author of a large number of books about
The Beatles and the 60s era including 'The Beatles Who's Who', 'The Best
Years of the Beatles' and the Fab Four's 'Encyclopedia' series. He has appeared
on 'Good Morning America' and has received a Gold Award from the British
Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.